Animate Weapon

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glinruin1967 wrote:

Another new league a still GGG you have not added Animate Weapon to the "Enduring Bond" passive. This would fix some of the issues with Bossing.

VERY DISSAPOINTING

This !

Decided to pick up AW this league; wanted to try a summoner and AW looked the most amusing to me (I love how derpy the weapons look when attacking super fast). Overall, have been loving the build this league and have pushed Atlas progression faster than any previous character I've run.

Just want to give feedback to help improve the playability of this skill. I don't think any of this is new, but want to keep a constant ping with hopes that improvements are made one day and others can be convinced to come play this wonderful skill.

I think there are two related problems that greatly impact the playability of the skill:
1. AW Minions don't persist across instances.
2. It takes too long to re-summon most to all of your AW weapons.

As a benchmark, my build has a cast-rate of ~2 AW/sec, with 19 maximum. Throw in having to cast bladefall and that's >10s of casting if I want a full stack at the start of an instance.


I don't think either problem is bad on it's own, but combined lead to significant effects on the player:
1. Tediousness. Every new instance summoning even a portion of an army is just boring. As someone who really enjoys BV, I personally don't mind having to build up and sustain 'charges', but AW is a bit excessive. Its enough that it detracts from wanting to play certain content (cough, cough delve).
2. Death is too punishing in certain areas, such that an AW playstyle really only has 1 portal, not 6. Maven's crucible is a great example where dieing to a rippy set of bosses once can make subsequent attempts/portals nearly impossible as there's no safe zone to resummon before continuing the encounter. I don't mind not having full power when re-entering these types of encounters, but the power trough is too significant.

Wanted to make a separate post for this as I think it's different feedback from my previous post. On this topic I wanted to talk about ranged animate weapons available through the Spirit Guards unique jewel.

I think the concept is a wonderful idea. In execution, they bring quite a bit of clear speed to AW builds; however, I think there's a few things missing from making them truly outstanding.

1. They're missing the QoL change that regular AW received; you have to summon them from dropped bows or wands; bladefall or similar will not work.

2. No way to lock summoning of item bases to certain AW skill gems. You can summon melee weapons from AW skill gem with projectile links and ranged weapons from AW with melee links. Due to the queueing nature of how weapons persist, this means that you have to re-summon your entire pool of ranged or melee weapons to clear the 1-2 mis-summoned, sub-optimal minions.

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Spartan76113 wrote:

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glinruin1967 wrote:

Another new league a still GGG you have not added Animate Weapon to the "Enduring Bond" passive. This would fix some of the issues with Bossing.

VERY DISSAPOINTING

This !

And again GGG has failed for 3.15!

WTF

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glinruin1967 wrote:

Another new league a still GGG you have not added Animate Weapon to the "Enduring Bond" passive. This would fix some of the issues with Bossing.

VERY DISSAPOINTING

Theu could make Enduring Bond work with all non permanent minion skills. SRS, Phantasms, HoP, AW, all would greatly benefit from this change and I really don't this would break the game.

While browsing this forum I realise that the problems that duration based minion gems have atm are present since several seasons so I hope to refresh the view upon Animate Weapon.

3.16 Scourge marked the first I used this skill gem and I was having a blast with it. Played my character to level 94 and did nearly every content with it.

But the potential of Qol-Improvements on this gem (and other duration based minion gems without making them OP) is quite huge and I think something needs to change on Animate Weapon (AW) and other duration based minion gems since these are realy unforgiving in endgame encounters or small arena fights (like maven invitations for example).Duration based minion skill gems need to be re-summoned after quite some time and having 19 minions to resommen while in the specific case of AW to recast bladefall several time to get 19 lingering blades on the ground and then recasting them is not fun at all.

Problem:
- When dieying in an encounter duration based minion gems like AW are too unforgiving. It's nearly impossible to get the fight back under control when you have to reenter the arena / bossfight, all non-duration-based-minions instantly aggroing all enemies while you are still in loading screen and having to summon 19 lingering blades on the gound and also casting AW 19 times. It is nearly impossible to resummon all weapons in the feared encounter without dieying.

1. Solution Option:
1.1: - Add AW's divergent quality effect (1% chance to create an additional Animate Weapon copy per Quality) to the base skill gem, remove the increase of the effect per quality and make it an flat 60% chance at all gem levels.
- minions Summoned by "Add duration based minion gem here" have 5% chance to refresh their Duration when they Hit a Unique Enemy.

2. Solution Option:
2.1: - When an "Add duration based minion gem here"-minion dies all existing minions have their duration increased by +X (X = 10-15)seconds.
- All minions will stay with you when switching the instance. Duration-based minions don't have to be resummoned. Their duration is not replenished while switching instances.

3. Solution Option:
3.1: - Increase the base duration from AW to 100 seconds.
- minions Summoned by "Add duration based minion gem here" have 5% chance to refresh their Duration when they Hit a Unique Enemy.

While Option 2 clearly is an huge buff in terms of bossfights Option 1 still has its favour for players that focus on putting more survivability into their minions.

Note: These things don't need to be added to the skill gems in particular. It would also be oaky to add some of these options as minion mastery nodes or to the skill tree. Maybe we could get an Watchers Eye effect based around Envy since it's aquisition threw United in Dream or as an elder weapon would be perfect for this (but I know not everyone loves to play chaos dmg minions).

These are just some Ideas I came up with but I think something has to change in terms of making duration based minions better to play. Having to resummon all your minions like 4 - 5 times per map, because clearing the normal map and the nightmare one from scourge takes too much time, even though the duration of AW is close to 90 seconds per build.

I hope to see a positive change to AW and any other existing duration based minion skill gem since I realy enjoyed playing AW in 3.16 and I think other gems could profit from these ideas too without making them somewhat broken or overpowered :)

I think this skill would best be suited with an AOE modifier. Having to animate weapons one at a time is a real hassle.

I feel this skill would be played a bit more being able to animate an area of weapons, instead of having to click over and over.

Overall in 3.19 I [mostly] enjoyed Animate Weapon however the QoL is a real killer. My feedback is in line with many other players ...

IMHO a pair of changes would make AW much more enjoyable to play:

1. Allow all minions to go between instances with no penalty. The minions still "die" when HP == 0, they are resummoned when at minion limit, or their timer expires.

2. Have the AW skill have an AOE and it animates ALL lingering blades [all weapons?] in that AOE. This would at least cut the resummons from 15-20 casts to hopefully just a few casts.

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Alternatively a unique that could speed up the process would be appreciated. Something like a jewel to automatically resummon minions IF there are lingering blades present or similar would certainly help with the down-time && the "you only have 6 portals" issues.

So I was really hyped about the new transfigured Animate Weapon of Ranged Arms, but that gem doesn't have the projectile tag. Can we support it with GMP regardless, like spectres with projectiles as attacks?

So, after The Great 3.23 Patchnotes I got some questions about the skill balancing.

You've removed lingering blades from EK (lvl 1 skill)
AW still requires a weapon on the ground
AW still has limited duration and doesn't travel between areas.
The only source of Lingering Blades is Bladefall (lvl 28 skill)

Why is AW lvl 4 skill?

You barely can collect 5 weapons if you run through the first act to Brutus at the default game pace, killing only magic monsters.

There is absolutely no reason to keep the skill at lvl 4, with removal of lingering blades from EK.